VICISSITUDES OF THE GENITIVE RULE

The article treats the history of the rule that prescribes the use of the genitive to mark the object of a negated verb in Russian. On the basis of assembled evidence on contemporary reflection on language and available descriptions of written usage, it is argued that the appearance of the rule in 17th-century Church Slavonic and 18th-century Russian grammars, as well as its disappearance in the first half of the 20th century, must be understood in terms of specific historical events and generic social and political mechanisms rather than in terms of autonomous linguistic change occurring over the investigated period. The paper concludes with an attempt to find an explanation why the literate part of the population tolerated a rule that lacked support in spoken usage for so long. Here a linguistic explanation is submitted. It is suggested that the semantics of the accusative of negation was to a certain extent incompatible with the pragmatics of written communication, as in the case of some deictic categories. As a consequence, non-narrative writing was not seriously affected by the ban on the use of the accusative, the genitive being more amenable to expressing negation in serious descriptive prose anyway. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]